A new video from NASA shows the successful installation of the first of 18 flight mirrors onto the James Webb Space Telescope Structure, at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. The installation of the ...

Recently inside the clean room at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, engineers successfully completed two deployments for the James Webb Space Telescope's "wings" or side portions of the backplane ...

After several years and a massive team effort, one of the world's largest telescopes has opened its giant eye again. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope (HET) at The University of Texas at Austin's McDonald Observatory has completed ...

The Soft X-ray focusing Telescope (SXT) onboard Astrosat, India's first satellite dedicated to astronomical observations, saw its first light from an astronomical source on Oct. 26, 2015, after the camera door was opened ...

Researchers at Chalmers University of Technology have succeeded in an experiment where they get an artificial atom to survive ten times longer than normal by positioning the atom in front of a mirror. The findings were recently ...

The world's first robotic laser adaptive optics system, developed by a team led by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa astronomer Christoph Baranec, will soon find a new home at the venerable 2.1-meter (83-inch) telescope at ...

Why do humans love to look at patterns? I can only guess, but I've written a whole book about new mathematical ways to make them. In Creating Symmetry, The Artful Mathematics of Wallpaper Patterns, I include a comprehensive ...

Mirror

A mirror is an object that reflects light or sound in a way that preserves much of its original quality prior to its contact with the mirror. Some mirrors also filter out some wavelengths, while preserving other wavelengths in the reflection. This is different from other light-reflecting objects that do not preserve much of the original wave signal other than color and diffuse reflected light. The most familiar type of mirror is the plane mirror, which has a flat surface. Curved mirrors are also used, to produce magnified or diminished images or focus light or simply distort the reflected image.

Mirrors are commonly used for personal grooming or admiring oneself (in which case the archaic term looking-glass is sometimes still used), decoration, and architecture. Mirrors are also used in scientific apparatus such as telescopes and lasers, cameras, and industrial machinery. Most mirrors are designed for visible light; however, mirrors designed for other types of waves or other wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation are also used, especially in non-optical instruments.